Darth Hater

Looking forward to this announcement.  I've been pretty bored lately.  I'd love it if this turns out to be a reason to get back into full time TOR!

My frustration is that time has told for the most part.  16 months, and only two new raid zones with 5 bosses each, 2 new flashpoints, and a small handful of new War Zones without any major new game modes, and even after all these months of the supposed success of the Cartel Market, they still have to make their next major content patch an expansion pack that you have to pay for.  Other MMOs put out content patches with more content than RotHC several times a year without charging extra, and when they release an expansion pack it basically brings the entire game to a new level.  I'm just sad that my favorite MMO in years still is getting so neglected when it comes to meaningful, repeatable content.  And these responses from BioWare make it seem like they are mostly getting by because of all the new players who haven't yet had time to burn through all the content in 4 months, whereas people who started at release have a lot less to enjoy at this point.  And I don't blame them.  ToR would be pretty amazing if it had only gone live for everyone 120 days ago.

Great read.  I didn't know anything about the history of the Hutts before this!

Get a smooth group and the exp is great.

Its also an MMORPG, and Flashpoints are easily the best way to actually play with other people and enjoy the multiplayer aspects of the game.  Even better because it really gets the different roles of healing, damage, and tanking doing their thing.  Its also nice to fight bosses that have actual mechanics, rather than something that hits you while you hit it until someone dies.

As for their not being any story... all of them have story and reasons why you're there doing the things you're doing.  Some of them have very strong stories that drive the entire SWTOR plot.

As one of the former podcast team, I'd just like to jump in and say thanks for the praise!  I loved being a part of it, so always happy to hear people liked it =D

Those prices... I guess if BioWare is making the money the game needs to improve that's great, but 1800CC for a mount just seems crazy to me.  I could see $5 on average, $10 for a REALLY good one, which I guess the pod-racer mount might qualify for.  But ~$15-$18? 

On the upside, that preferred access bundle drove inventory expansion (account wide) credit prices down, so I got to max out on those!

I don't really care so much about when it comes out, as I do that it is truly an expansion and not just two patches put together for $10.  If it takes BioWare all year to put out something really high quality, than so be it.  I just want to see SWTOR live up to its potential!

Fair enough Z.  Just a lot of the guys have been taking some flak over "not playing TOR enough,"  so all the voices kind of run together.  I just try to at least point out that they do at least play a lot. 

Thanks for your compliments too  I'm glad at the very least all the years of my life I've spent on video games makes me sound knowledgeable =D  I'm hoping to work on my skill sets a bit and find some more chances to contribute to the industry one of these days.  But the chance for a break was well placed as far as the craziness of my RL schedule goes.

And Rogue, I totally get what you're saying.  I spent the first two or three beta builds working with BW people on getting the freakin launcher to update properly and load the game.  Didn't have any problems post-launch fortunately, but sorry to hear you ran in to so many!  Have you tried it again recently?

For those concerned, MMOChamp did just post a general update for several games, including 1.7 on SWTOR, and did link to Darth Hater as the place to go to check out all the latest information.

And Ztolerance, we did play the game quite a bit.  I may have slowed down a bit in the last few weeks, but the others haven't much.  But we focused on different aspects of the game.  I was the ops guy, I mostly did casual leveling, dailies, flashpoints, and operations.  Some of the others were level crazy and had like 10 level 50s but didn't do as much at high end.  Others did a lot more PvP than I did.  So we all played the game pretty actively, we just didn't all play every part of the game pretty actively.  I think that may be the "obvious" thing you've mistaken for hardly even playing.